A refugee from the Nazis at the age of 22, Lom arrived in London in 1939 and immediately set about continuing the acting career he'd started in his home city of Prague. His first role was a small but eyecatching one: Napoleon, in the Fox-produced biopic The Young Mr Pitt, with Robert Donat as the wily but principled British prime minister – starts at 6:30. (He would play Boney again in 1956, in the Audrey Hepburn War and Peace.)

Lom's unmistakeable charisma quickly won him admirers: though lead roles would be few and far between later on, he quickly scored one as the mysterious hypnotist in Brit thriller The Dark Tower, where he exerts his fateful, foreign-accented charm on circus girl Anne Crawford.

After the war, Lom was denied a visa to the US, and with it the chance of a Hollywood contract – presumably, in the febrile anti-communist atmosphere his Czech origins had become a problem. However Lom's saturnine visage was increasingly in demand for a string of underworld characters in British-shot black-and-white thrillers: a crooked antiques dealer in Appointment with Crime, a fence and smuggler in Brass Monkey and – most famously of all – the mob boss in Night and the City. The final scene of the film, when Lom's Kristo flicks a spent cigarette toward the floating corpse of Richard Widmark's Harry Fabian, is one of the coldest of all noir endings.

Rather brilliantly, Lom was cast to type in the 1955 Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, but with completely opposite effect. His fedora'd gangster was arguably the most competent and professional of the gang of crooks that plan to use a rented room to pull a heist; but he still gets his, but good.

Then there was Hell Drivers (1957); the most fearsome collection of British alpha males to appear in one film together. Stanley Baker, Sean Connery, Patrick McGoohan and, er, Sid James. Lom donned a moustache to play an Italian trucker. Naturally, as Baker's loyal pal, Lom is on the receiving end again, hurtling down a one-way street to destruction.

Lom conclusively stepped out of the low-budget British film world with a major role in Northwest Frontier for director J Lee Thompson, who had cast him a year earlier in No Trees in the Street. Lom played a Muslim journalist called Van Leyden whose intentions towards a young Hindu are not viewed as entirely harmless. Not at all PC by today's standards, and that's putting it mildly.

Lom finally got his hands on a lead role in 1962, in the Hammer remake of The Phantom of the Opera. Some kind soul has uploaded it in full, so settle down and enjoy the baroque stylings of one of Terence Fisher's slightly less well-known works.

Then came the role that would define and memorialise Lom: Commissioner Dreyfus of the Surete, long-suffering boss of Peter Sellers' Clouseau. Dreyfus didn't feature in the first Pink Panther film, in 1963; but he was brought on board for the rushed-out second, A Shot in the Dark. With his maniacal giggle and demonic twitch, Lom turned in a performance fully worthy of a serious foil to Sellers' genius.

In the 70s, the quality of work Lom was offered began to dry up as the British film world suffered. He was ensemble cast fodder in the 1974 Agatha Christie whodunnit, And Then There Were None (playing the drunk doctor), and the 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes. But it was the various sequels to the Pink Panther that kept him busy.

Lom's final big-screen role of note was in 1993's Son of the Pink Panther, where again he played Dreyfus, but this time to Roberto Benigni. Not many people liked the film, sadly, but if nothing else it reminded the film world of past glories.